Prior to the merit system, the automatic activities system upgrade never gave the forum this kind of infiltration threads on activities across the sections . And, even when they are, they were mostly on the meta section.
Well, before merit there were even bigger problems: massive spam and account farming. The former is still exist but account farming is pretty much impossible to do now. All the hassle with the merit system is nothing compared to the work needed to combat spammer before the system was implemented.
I think the reason for seeing such merit threads is because, it is manually given. If it were automatically merited, the infiltration of threads won't be here with us.
How do we
automatically judge which post is merit-worthy? Super advanced AI?